![]() ![]() ![]() I have the utmost respect for my parents so I’m going to be careful not to denigrate them or their parenting when I compare some of my real-life experiences to what goes on in Chinese Parents. The whole game takes a gentle satirical eye to Chinese parenting styles, recognising the good and the bad, without pointing any fingers, but instead laughing and crying together in a show of solidarity. Funnily enough the deep (deep) void is a mechanic in Moyuwan’s simulation – if you let your child get too stressed out, their “Mind’s Shadow” takes over and you get an automatic game over. So it’s with great relief that I can say Chinese Parents is both rather accurate, and rather fun. But there’s some unresolved stuff that a game like this threatens to unleash: if the representation of my adolescent stress was not depicted with the utmost delicacy, I risked spiralling into a deep (deep) void. I might not have grown up in China but my parents are definitely – at least last time I checked – Chinese. What harm could it do, with its colourful, cutesy art-style and the premise of tracing a young Chinese child from birth to their eventual undertaking of the Gaokao (the university entrance exam)? As I now know, it treads a delicate balance of being realistic without being exploitative, comically satirical without being reductive of an entire generation’s experiences. Chinese Parents looked like a harmless enough life sim. ![]()
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